Category: game design

Where do you stand on content from game A turning up in Game A: 2 The sequel? I really do not know where I stand myself. Generally,  I don’t care. if it turned out that the tree models in Company of heroes 2 were the same tree models from COH 1, I wouldn’t mind. Ditto some of the sound effects. A tiger tank gun sounds the same as it did when the original game was released, and sound playback technology is the same now as it was then.

But what about the same music? Is that ok? I suspect not. And some of the same text somewhere? hmmmmm

I ask this because I built democracy 3 on top of the data for Democracy 2. With the exception of the new events, dilemmas and voter groups and policies, existing data is currently being carried straight over to the new game. obviously it might be re-balanced, but I’m not sure I need to re-write from scratch the descriptions of all policies or voter groups. That seems silly.

I *have* totally binned all the sound effects, and got brand new ones, because I think that makes things sound newer and fresher. All of the policy icons are the same, but totally re-done in 4X the resolution so it’s all much crisper. That was definitely worth doing.

but I do worry that somewhere, someone will rant on reddit that D3 is a rip-off because the description for income tax is the same as Democracy 2, and thus the game is just a ‘re-skin’. Obviously it isn’t, the underlying sim was dramatically redesigned and works very differently, but you can’t tell that without stepping through all the source code. Am I wrong to panic about a tiny percentage of pedants who might feel that way? or do you expect sequels to games to be done completely from the ground up in terms of data and artwork?

Ahahaha. See what I did there? I’m blogging about cynicism in Democracy 3. It’s much better than cynicism in democracy 2, or at least the developer claims it is, it probably won’t be…amirite?

Enough sad puns. Anyway, cynicism in democracy 2 worked like this: If the player raised taxes just after being re-elected (or at the game start, which is the same thing) or dropped them just before an election, the level of global cynicism went up, and this was a factor in deciding who to vote for at the next election. Simple.

The trouble is, it was too cynical. if you cut inheritance taxes just before an election, the middle classes and wealthy may well find it cynical, but will people unaffected by the change (the poor etc) really even notice? And there are other policies than tax. If you introduce armed police just before an election shouldn’t patriots and conservatives be a bit cynical about that?

So Democracy 3 introduces 2 radical changes to the way cynicism is calculated. Firstly, it is per-voter group. So you are only made cynical by changes which actually have some effect on your beliefs and situation. As a non parent, you won’t care if child benefit goes up or down or when it happens, you ignore it. Secondly, cynicism now acts on all decisions, not just tax. So laws, government spending…anything that has a noticeable effect on the opinions of a voter group will trigger a rise in cynicism for that group.

That’s the theory. Right now it’s buggy as anything, but I will fix it today. No seriously…I’m sure it will get fixed today.

Latest edition!…

Another short video showing off new color schemes and some new features:

The core mechanic of Democracy 3 is going to take a lot of careful explaining in tutorials and tooltips and help windows. Essentially, it’s pretty simple, in that you implement policies, and you can adjust the intensity of a policy using a slider. So with a policy like income tax, the slider adjust the rate of tax from low to high. A series of bars show you the effect this policy has on everything, such as voter happiness, GDP, and so on. Sounds simple so far right? This is where it gets complex because there are three additional factors, which are implementation times, effectiveness and inertia. I’ll explain each one:

Implementation times is the amount of game time it takes to introduce a new policy. For a new tax rate, it’s instant, but for a space program, it might be five years. The policy effect fades in over those five years. So for example, if you set the slider to maximum, and the effect on GDP is +10% at maximum, then one year after introducing the policy, all the effects are still only at 20% of their maximums, and the GDP boost is thus 2%. Implementation rate is also the rate at which you can adjust a policy. Again, with tax rates it’s instant, with big infrastructure projects, you might move the slider from 0.5 to 1.0, but it will gradually make it’s way there over time, and the effects will scale accordingly.

Effectiveness is a general multiplier for all of the effects of a policy, and this is based on the minister in charge of that department. He can be bad, reducing its effectiveness, or good, which boosts it. Over time, all ministers get more experienced, so their effectiveness will go up.

Inertia indicates the extent to which policy effects lag behind implementation. For example free school meals increase total population health, but it’s a very slow effect, over time as school children grow up, and maintain those healthy eating habits. So the effect may have an ‘inertia’ of ten years (Should be longer, but for gameplay reasons…). This means that even though the policy is fully implemented, it’s full effects aren’t being felt yet, and also, when the policy is cancelled, the effects may linger on afterwards, slowly declining.

Combined together (and this is just part of it), it’s uber-complex and subtle. It means that at any one time a single policy may be becoming more effective as it gets more implemented, and more so as it’s minister learns the ropes, whilst at the same time be drifting towards lower values as the effects of a policy change since it was introduced take effect, and at the same time as all this, the various effects it has may all have different rates of ‘inertia’ and thus be shifting in different directions :D

Fortunately I’ve learned a lot of stuff about GUI design from earlier games. I’m sure it will be fine :D